Technology Marches On / Cell Phones

"Check Out Life Before Cell Phones"

The widely available cellphone is a major Trope Breaker, leading to many clumsy explanations for why cell phones don't work in particular circumstances. And far fewer characters get murdered in a phone booth these days, for instance.

The mobile phone is actually Older Than They Think, though, especially in the form of a "car phone". While expensive and limited in many ways, commercially available car phone technology dates back to the late 1940s, often with radio used to contact an operator, who then would patch the call into the regular phone system.^note Just to demonstrate this trope, searching for images of "car phone" on Google would get you dashboard mounts for your smartphone instead of actual car phones. An episode of the 1950s TV series Superman shows editor Perry White using the MTS radiotelephone in his car to call his office. There are several episodes of Perry Mason showing Paul Drake using one, and one of the very first James Bond film gadgets was the car phone he casually uses in From Russia with Love.

There is also the matter of smartphones become common devices; with data service becoming common on top of voice/messaging service, looking up information online can done near instantly where wireless data service is available.

It's gotten to the point where you can tell the age of a show on how large their cell-phone is — cell-phones went from being battery-powered, with chargers the size of briefcases, to being the size of bricks with call-time lasting about an hour, turning into slim texting machines, to doubling as cameras, to the slim creations from around 2008-2010 that could make short videos with battery times that can last for days, to the big touchscreen multipurpose internet devices of 2016 (and onward) that can make long full HD videos and have battery times that barely last more than 24 hours.

Do note that while cell phones are everywhere nowadays, cell phone service is not. It is still possible to lose coverage in remote areas, especially since signal coverage is operator-specific (e.g., you can have full AT&T signal, so-so Verizon signal, and zero T-Mobile signal in the same spot) — you can even lose service within a metropolitan area or in underground areas e.g. subway tunnels — so stories where the heroes are stranded in the middle of nowhere/underground can still be plausible. (Plus it's easy to lose a cell phone, of course.)

For extra laughs, see the Just For Fun page, Cell Phones Could Have Solved This Plot.

Anime & Manga

• Case Closed
  • The entire premise of "The Disappearing Weather Girl" relies on texting not being as pervasive or widely available in 1998 as it is now. A newscaster is kidnapped by a jealous rival, and tries to use her cellphone to alert the authorities. However, because her mouth is duct-taped shut, she has to send coded numeric messages to Conan's pager (since it can't receive text messages, only numbers) in order to let him know she's been abducted. Additionally, Conan's friends still treat cellphones as a relative rarity, with none of them owning one.
  • Becomes a plot point when Conan realizes something was amiss that a famous novelist is still writing plots that have been outmoded thanks to just about everybody and their brother having cell phones. It turned out that the said novelist's brother locked him into an attic and forced him to go on writing.
• In the final arc of the Mobile Police Patlabor manga (written in the late '80s - early '90s, set in the late '90s - early 2000s) the bad guys attack the police station where the protagonists are stationed during a hurricane to force a Griffon - Ingram match. To prevent anybody from interfering, they blow up the bridges leading to the station and wreck any landline phones and radios they can find (including a car phone) so the protagonists can't call for help. Considering how common cell phones were in the early 2000s... Yeah.
• In Revolutionary Girl Utena, super rich and powerful playboy Akio drives around town (and pretty much everyplace else) in a souped-up convertible. Everything about the car is meant to emphasize extreme luxury, and its crowning feature is the inclusion of a car phone. When the show came out, this was, typically, an item only used by powerful and wealthy businessmen, so it underscored what a well-connected player Akio was. Nowadays, it looks downright quaint, and makes the car look like a 20 year old model that Akio got second hand.
• One of the main reasons why When They Cry takes place in the eighties, in a countryside village or in an otherwise isolated island. Word of God stated that the reason for this setting is that many of the problems the cast are confronted with could be dealt or rendered moot in a much easier way if they had access to the Internet or to wireless communications from their locations.
• In Heat Guy J, Clair still has a rotary phone, even though the series takes place 20 Minutes into the Future. Other characters are shown using flip phones, as well.
• In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean, despite taking place in 2011 to 2012, the computers and cellphones used look like they were made in the late 90s to early 2000s (when the arc was written). During the Heavy Weather arc, Versus assumes that Emporio could have only obtained information with a laptop rather than a smartphone.

Comic Books

• Iron Man:
  • There was a time when Iron Man, maker and wearer of a flying super-strong suit of armor, had a rotary phone built into his armor. (This was the same era when said armor was powered by that wonder of the age, the transistor.)
  • In Tales of Suspense #50, Iron Man uses a slide ruler calculator built into his armor's gauntlet.
• Batman and Robin have been known to use a hotline to talk to Commissioner Gordon. Several stories implied that the Batphone worked off a direct physical phoneline that went all the way from Wayne Manor to police headquarters. One example is an actual phone, cord and everything, in the glove compartment of the Batmobile. Also, they've used radios to talk to each other, but it was something hidden in their belts.
  • The iconic Bat Signal itself may qualify. Originally introduced in the 1940s, it was a handy way for Gordon to tell Batman he needed to see him when Bats wasn't near the hotline phone. Once tech rendered the Bat Signal unnecessary, later stories have dealt with the problem by implying that the real purpose of the signal is to inspire hope in the people of Gotham, and remind them that there is someone looking out for them — or, by contrast, to inspire fear in the criminals of Gotham and remind them that Batman is out there somewhere.
  • Batman and the Mad Monk (one of the innumerable spin-offs to Batman: Year One) actually has Gordon being given a Bat-Pager, which he throws off the building as being "too secret", to be replaced with the Bat-Signal as an open acknowledgement and endorsement of the police to Batman.
• The Green Arrow story "Quiver" has Ollie brought back to life, about ten years out of date (long story; his soul opted to remain in heaven, but he allowed Hal Jordan to resurrect a version of himself from before his life was screwed up). Since the story was written in 1999, this means he was unfamiliar with cellphones, mistaking one for a walky-talky, and believing it to be an expensive piece of tech when he was told it could call anywhere.
• El Negro Blanco is a 1990s Argentine comic strip. Chispa, who was avoiding her boyfriend, instructed her friend to tell him that she wasn't there if he calls to the office. And what if he calls to her cell phone? "Oh, this thing? Tell him that it's broken again", and she tosses into the trash bin, compacting everything that was there. A comic strip from the times when cell phones did exist, but had the size and weight of a brick or even more.
• In The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye, Empurata was the punishment of removing a robot's face and replacing it with a single open box and optic, like a television screen. Roberts suggested that when it became common practice in a Bad Future, to make it more severe the Functionists replaced it with what was basically a text message screen with pop-up-adverts, basically resembling a mobile phone.
  • In the 1980s, the Cassetticons were carried inside the tape-decks that were Soundwave and Blaster. Nowadays the cassette is completely obsolete and kids might not even recognise it. Now, Cassetticons transform into large USB sticks (and are known as Mini-Cons and Mini-Bots), and are frequently looked down on for their alt modes being non-mobile. Their main ability is the recording and storing of vast amounts of information.
• In the comic book anthology "The Big Book of Losers", there is a chapter that discuses the "video phone," which says that telecommunications companies have wasted "millions, if not billions" of dollars to allow people to see each other while talking on the phone, only for no one to adopt the technology outside of business teleconferences, and also mentions that there may negative side-effects with children seeing a loved one through a screen, and that perverts may use the technology to flash people from anywhere in the world. This argument may have made sense at the time the comic book was published (1997), but today (2022), with the emergence of both broadband internet and LTE cellular technology allowing faster connections, people casually use services like FaceTime and WhatsApp to see each other while talking with one another, and other services like Skype, or, especially during the COVID-19 Pandemic, Zoom, allow regular people to conduct business with one another from the comfort of their homes.

Comic Strips

• Calvin and Hobbes: One arc from 1989 involves Calvin locking his babysitter Rosalyn out of the house. Because this written back when cell phones were rare and expensive, Rosalyn has to stay outside and wait for Calvin's parents to come home. These days, she would call them and they'd come home immediately.
• Dick Tracy had his wrist communicators for decades before cell phones starting in the 1940s. Furthermore, they are upgraded about every twenty years for additional functions. Interestingly enough, there have been various versions of wrist-cellphones — often compared to Det. Tracy's radio — since the early 2000s.
• Phoebe and Her Unicorn regularly invokes this trope for laughs, such as when Phoebe discovers her Mom's CORDED phone.
• A Scary Gary strip from 2010 had Leopold comment "Blackberrys have made my life so much easier." after successfully ambushing a person who was glued to his phone. When the strip was reprinted in 2020, "Blackberrys" was replaced with "Smartphones", since Blackberrys have been pushed to the side in the years since then by big competitors.

Fan Works

• The fan fiction "The Prince" is an alternate retelling of the story of Jesus Christ from the New Testament set in the Midwest USA and in the present day (originally written in the year 2000). In this fanfic, the character Lucas has a cell phone. Back in 2000, this was unusual for a 13-year-old in the 8th grade — the author included this to show that Lucas was the most scientific, intellectual, and techno-savvy of all of Joshua Christopher's friends. Nowadays, the author would have to have Lucas have at least an iPad in order to show his nerdiness.

Film — Live-Action

• The Intrepid Reporter heroine of the 1957 Big Creepy-Crawlies film Beginning of the End has a car phone. Interestingly, it's treated in a matter-of-fact way, not like an unusual technology that has to be explained to the audience.
• In A Clockwork Orange, Alex's gang's MO for breaking into houses is to knock on doors reporting an accident and ask to use the telephone. These days it would be more suspicious that no one involved in the supposed accident has a cellphone.
• In American Reunion, Stifler, Finch, and Oz go to Jim's neighbor's house and ask to use their phone to get roadside assistance, and are actually trying to distract them so Jim can sneak their underage daughter, who has been drinking, back into the house. The neighbors question this immediately, wondering how none of them have a cell phone.
• In Richard Lester's 1965 Swinging London movie The Knack... and How to Get It, a pompous guy is using a limo phone. Tom, a rather mad young man, holds up a potted plant and taps at the window. When the guy rolls it down, Tom tells him "Pardon me, sir, you're wanted on the other fern."
• The famous "Birth" sketch (also known as "The Machine that goes Ping") from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life was, at the time, a cutting satire on what was seen as unnecessary spending on medical equipment. Nowadays, anyone who's seen a modern medical drama, with the surgeons surrounded by massive banks of electronic equipment, may wonder what all the fuss is about — to the point that operating without such equipment nowadays would be seen as unusual and dangerous. Other parts of the sketch though remain relevant.
  • Also, Cleese and Chapman tell the woman after the birth that she can get a video of the birth of her child on VHS and Betamax!
    • ... and Super 8mm film!
• Soylent Green is set in 2022, and yet Thorn is forced to rely on police call boxes, opposed to a radio or a cell. Another note is someone playing a video game with clearly very old vector-style graphics, as opposed to the high-resolution and/or photorealistic games that have existed since the mid-2000s.
• In Time Bandits Evil asks Robert to explain "subscriber trunk dialing", which is a means of direct dialing a long distance number (rather than going through an operator), which is now largely obsolete now that every call is direct dialed.
• TRON: Legacy lampshades this with Alan Bradley telling Sam Flynn that he got a message on his pager from Kevin Flynn. Sam seems almost as surprised that Alan still has a functional pager as he is that the message came from his father, who disappeared over twenty years ago.
• In 2001: A Space Odyssey, Floyd uses a video payphone. Payphones are obsolete now and video phones flopped, though video conferencing over computers is fairly common and there are Skype/Facetime apps for cell phones.
• The rapid evolution of the cell phone is given a nod in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. Among the personal items that Gordon Gecko gets back once he leaves prison is his (formerly) extravagant and top-of-the-line brick-sized cell phone.
• Zoolander (2001) is an odd half-example. The joke is that Derek's cell phone is teeny-tiny, less than an inch long, again in reference to his pampered lifestyle and expensive tastes. But it's still a black, only slightly flattened brick, with its little antenna. It failed to anticipate that the advent of smartphones would stop dead (and maybe even reverse) the trend they were exaggerating.
• In the original Die Hard (1988), John McClane's inability to contact the outside causes him some problems initially, as he's forced to use a captured radio to try calling the police. If he had had a mobile phone, the movie would have gone much differently. Humorously, Argyle spends most of the film luxuriating in the fact that he can call his friends on his limo's car phone.
  • In Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995), Simon Gruber makes McClane and Zeus Carver drive all around Manhattan to answer specific payphones, then bluffs the police off their radios by insinuating some of the bombs were keyed to police frequencies... then he locks up the entire New York switchboard by calling a popular radio station about the fake bomb he planted in a school, to destroy the other means of communication the NYPD could've had. Cell phones would've beaten all three methods in a second (but then again, Simon would've probably had something for that eventuality as well). Plus, the riddles would also be a lot less suspenseful if John and Zeus had just Googled the answers on their smartphones.
• In Scream, the killer uses a cell phone to call his victims, so Billy is considered a suspect simply because he also has one. The film came out just before cell phones were about to take off, in spite of Billy's protest that "everybody's got one".
• Used for dramatic irony in Drive Angry; the protagonist, who has been — well, out of touch for a while — picks up a cell phone, has no idea what it is or what it can do for him, and tosses it aside. He eventually figures it out and later asks a companion if she has one of those "portable phones."
• The Haunting (1999) has Dr Marrow saying he has a cell phone in case of emergency. Naturally it gets broken and the characters can't contact anyone for help. These days the likes of Theo and Luke would definitely have one too. Eleanor perhaps not considering how repressed she was.
• Clueless (released in 1995) is a bit of an odd example: the teen protagonist and her friends all have cellphones... which was meant to show how ridiculously wealthy and privileged they were. Since nowadays every teenager regardless of social class has a cell phone, anyone watching the film today would simply comment on how dated the phones look (and possibly how dumb or hive-minded they seem with their ringtones being identical). Likewise, the scene where the girls are talking to each other on the phone while walking side-by-side isn't quite so hilarious because, even if they're overwhelmingly texting each other rather than talking nowadays, it's entirely possible to see people doing this in real life.
• Similarly, the film version of The Beverly Hillbillies in 1993 had a moment where a phone rings in a school washroom (at a wealthy prep school) and it's Played for Laughs that every student pulls out her own phone to check which one is ringing. Nowadays, of course, even working-class students usually have their own phone, and individualized ringers to boot. In the same scene we're supposed to chuckle at these rich kids spreading news quickly due to access to fax machines.
• In The Birdcage it's a fairly major plot point that while a character can dial out from her car phone, she can't receive calls on it. Thus while she can call out for her messages, and then call the protagonists, they can't call her back to say that plans have changed yet again.
• Casino Royale: The presence of mobile phones were probably intended to show how gadgets aren't necessary in the modern world. They looked terrific at the time (remember that GPS?) but amusingly, in the smartphone era, they all now look terribly out of date, which is partly why Skyfall would reintroduce Q and the Q department's gadgets to the series.
• In a Check-Out-Life-Before-Smartphones example, when one of the passengers in Snakes on a Plane suggests they e-mail the herpetologist photos of the snakes they've killed so he can identify them, everyone else assumes they need to find a digital camera and computer. She holds up her smartphone and tells them it has both.
• In Commando, a group of baddies kidnap John Matrix's daughter and try to use her as leverage to get him to do an assassination for them. He rebels (of course) and begins trying to get her back by tracking down the members of the group and getting them to reveal where she is. One of the first such members, Sully, frantically tries to get to a phone booth to inform his superiors about what's going on and in one case is in the middle of dialing when Matrix destroys the phone booth to stop the call from going through. Starting about 10-12 years later, Sully would almost certainly have had a cell phone and could have placed the call within seconds of seeing Matrix, leading to the grisly demise of his daughter.
• Matilda: A point of tension in the film comes from the fact that no one believes the children about how ridiculously abusive the Trunchbull is to her students (and Miss Honey). The film was released in 1996. Nowadays, such a problem would very easily be fixed by the fact that most cell phones have video-capture capabilities, and really have been used by students to document child abuse in classrooms.
• The Ref, has two instances that stand out in the cell phone age.
  • The One Last Job of cat burglar Gus goes badly wrong, and he forces a local upper middle class couple to hide him from police patrols in their house. There's a problem though: it's Christmas Eve, and the extended family is already on the road, so there's no possible way to cancel them coming over now! Instead they have to improvise by having Gus pretend to be the dysfunctional couple's marriage counselor, pretending to attend the dinner with them. The film came out in '94; it's a pretty safe bet that within the next five years or so the extended family would have had cell phones and could have been called off with a convincing lie.
  • At one point, Gus has to give his partner the couple's home phone number to call when the partner figures out a way to sneak Gus past the cops patrolling the area. Inconveniently, one time when the partner tries calling the house a cop checking the houses of the neighborhood picks up the phone instead. Today, it would be assumed that Gus and his partner would have cell phones that they would be calling directly, and it's pretty unlikely that such a scenario would ever come up.
• In To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, a Road Trip Plot movie about a trio of drag queens, it's a big deal when Vida tosses their road map after a bad encounter with her parents early in the trip. Chi-Chi wonders how they'll get to LA without it, and when their car breaks down in the middle of nowhere, they have no idea where in "Gay Hell" they are. The movie came out in 1995; had it been more contemporary, the queens would have had smartphones with Google Maps or a standalone GPS in the car.
• Invoked in Kingsman: The Secret Service — when Harry is showing Eggsy all the cool spy gadgets hidden in mundane objects, Eggsy points to a wall of smartphones and asks what kind of gadget is hidden inside them. Harry admits they're just off-the-shelf smartphones, as civilian technology has caught up with the spy game in that area.
• Part of the plot of The Wiggles Movie (Magical Adventure: A Wiggly Movie in the North American release) involves the titular group trying to find Dorothy to bring her to her surprise birthday party. The film originally was released in 1997 in Australia, and 2003 in North America. If it was released today, the Wiggles would have easily be able to call her on her cellphone, and be able to find her, direct her to the party, or clarify the whole situation with the Wally the Great. (He and the Wiggles only meet up at the end of Act 3.)
• The plot of the '50s film Pillow Talk revolves entirely around the phenomenon of "party lines," where two people were hooked up to the same phone line. The heroine is frustrated that she's sharing a line with a womanizer who's constantly tying it up talking to his dates.
• One major plot point in the 90's film Madhouse (1990) is that one character's doctor can't get through due to a Phoneaholic Teenager constantly using the only phone line, to the extent that said doctor finally getting through to leave an answering machine message kicks off the climax. These days, the doctor would have multiple cell phone lines he could probably call, the teen probably would have had her own phone so as to not clog other lines, the doctor could leave voice mail even if the line in question was in use, and a growing number of practitioners have a secure website for patients to check a diagnosis without even needing to speak directly to the doctor.
• In Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, a sequel to Jumanji, Beth complains how she misses her phone. Alex who was stuck in the game for the past 20 years, puzzled, asks whether "phone" means something else in her time... a 1996 teen could have hardly imagined the modern smartphone centered culture.
  • To be fair, she refers to it like it's one of her senses; the loss of it being like a Disability Superpower, heightening her other senses.
• In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, where the crew travel back to The '80s, Gillian mistakes Kirk's communicator (when it beeps in the restaurant scene) for "pocket pager" and inquires if he's a doctor (the most obvious kind of person to be using such a device). That is, before he starts talking through it. Nowadays, it could simply be passed off as a rather odd-looking cellphone set to speaker.
• Cloud Atlas: Averted for Meronym, as she is mostly dependent on the exact same technology as Sonmi~451's era, some 175 years prior, such as the floating half-silvered video screens and the Mauna Sol broadcast facility. Inverted entirely for Village folk and Kona, who don't have a shred of anything beyond the stone age, aside from a single book, and crossbows.
• In Les Visiteurs (1993), Béatrice de Montmirail (Valérie Lemercier) phones (via landline) Jacques-Henri Jacquart (Christian Clavier) and asks him to take a photo of a portrait in his castle with a Polaroid, then we assume he'd have to mail it to her or she would go to the castle and pick it up. Modern cellphones would make it much easier for her to get such a picture in no time.

Literature

• For all of Gibson's eerie prescience in Neuromancer, he didn't foresee the mass saturation of cellphones. As even Gibson admits, it wasn't that he was prescient, it's that a lot of people read the book, looked at some aspect of the technology and went "That's so cool! I want to have that!" and went out and made it happen.
• Cujo. The mother and son could have called animal control and gotten out of the car in an hour if they had a cellphone. Instead, they are trapped for a couple of days.
  • Assuming they could get a signal that far outside the nearest (quite small) town.
• In the short story "Graveyard Shift" (contained in Stephen King's Night Shift collection), King illustrates the large size of a rat by writing that it had a tail "as thick as a telephone cord." The phrase was written in 1969-70, when the cord that connected a phone to a wall outlet was about the thickness of a telephone cable. Today's readers are likely to say either "So what?" (as the cord that plugs a modern phone into a wall is considerably thinner, close to the thickness of an ordinary rat's tail) or "A 'telephone whaaaa'?"
• In the original Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books, there was almost always a scene of someone scrambling to find a pay phone to call for help. In the newest books, they just zip off text messages. It makes trying to get a kid interested in the old books difficult when they keep asking "What's a pay phone?"
• Deliberately invoked in the Doctor Who Expanded Universe novel Business Unusual, written in 1997 but set in 1989. Mel's dad sees his G1 mobile phone the size of a brick as a bit of a status symbol (he's a businessman involved with computers). The Doctor is not impressed.
• Ray Bradbury's "The Murderer" not only described a world with universal personal phones (though he imagined them on your wrist like Dick Tracy's wrist radio), he predicted the drawbacks — being called at all times by salesmen and phony surveys, the noise of other people's phones around you — to the extent that the story is told from the POV of someone who's been driven mad by it.
• In Back to Methuselah, written in 1918-20, the 21st century has videophones, but in the far future people communicate at a distance by holding a tuning fork by their head and speaking at the same pitch. No hint how it works: it's future tech, it's meant to be baffling.
• In the My Teacher Is an Alien series, Peter is given an incredibly useful device called a URAT (Universal Reader And Translator) by the aliens, which just goes to show how amazing their tech is. It can be used as a video communicator, can look up pretty much any information, can give you directions to anywhere you want to go, and can even be used to order merchandise that will then be delivered to your home! In short, it is a smartphone, which sounded a lot more futuristic in the early '90s when the books were written. Considering that one of the major plot threads in the story is the aliens being afraid of how quickly the human race is advancing, this could be Hilarious in Hindsight.
• The gimmick of the children's book Calling Questers Four is that the pre-teen protagonists have the unique ability to contact each other without having to look for a payphone — they own a pair of walkie-talkies.
• In The Baby-Sitters Club, published in the late '80s-early '90s, a big deal is made of Claudia's having her own phone line so that they can use it as the Club's number. Nowadays, of course, the girls would all have their own phones.
• The first Red Dwarf novel from 1989 has Rimmer reminding Z-Shift to "stay by a 'phone" in case of emergencies and Petrovich trying to get through to Rimmer for "over an hour" because Rimmer isn't answering a pager-like device.
• One of the frustrations with Mr. Quimby's unemployment in Ramona and Her Father is the fact that he (and, by extension, Ramona) has to stick close to the phone for calls about job interviews, making for many boring afternoons with a cranky father.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
  • The titular device is an electronic book, a revolutionary idea in 1978. It's a self-contained device with only one purpose: to serve as an electronic travel encyclopedia. Ford was researching the new edition. The author anticipated over-the-air downloads, as Ford eventually downloads an update and finds that the original, longer entry on Earth he wrote exists in the plural sector he was visiting. However, today the Guide would be a website on the galactic Internet or an app, and the device itself would be something like a smartphone or tablet. Ford would be able to send electronic messages (email, text) after getting stranded, but probably wouldn't get help anyway because most of the people he knows hate him. Even if it was a single electronic book, it wouldn't be as expensive as is hinted.^note Mostly Harmless mentions that the publisher is getting frustrated at the fact that the book, which is aimed at hitchhikers who are usually broke vagabonds, aren't able to pay enough to cover the cost of operations. So they try to retool it as a toy for rich kids "slumming it". Real stand-alone electronic books are usually reference books or religious material, made from the same (obsolete) tech as PDAs.
  • The electronic thumb would probably be met with all sorts of firewall/filter-type blocking, preventing the Dentrassi from being able to get Ford and Arthur aboard the Vogon ship. (That last bit does get somewhat referenced in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, which says half the electronics engineers in the galaxy are trying to find ways to block the thumb, while the other half are trying to find ways round the blocks.) This is surprisingly true to life even in 2021 - a similar arms race exists between websites hosting region-locked content (such as streaming services) and creators of VPN that allow you to set your device's IP address to appear to originate from a specific country.
  • The ironic fate of the Golgafrinchans, an alien race who tricked all the "middlemen" into leaving the planet, only to have the movers and shakers who stayed behind killed off by a plague originating from a dirty public telephone booth (the "telephone sanitizers" were among the middlemen). This was obviously meant to be silly, but it makes even less sense in retrospect that a civilization capable of shipping 1/3rd of its population across the galaxy would still be using pay phones.
• In Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency written by Douglas Adams and published in 1987, the status and wealth of the character Gordon Way is illustrated by the fact that his Mercedes features a car phone and a tape deck.
• In Tiger Eyes, the Framing Device for the entire novel is the death of protagonist Davey's father. He dies while waiting for an ambulance to arrive, and part of the reason it takes so long for the ambulance to get there is because it has to be called from a pay phone due to their location. If the book were being written today, the entire situation would have to be done completely differently.
• In Bimbos of the Death Sun, set in the 1980s, an infamous fantasy author is murdered at a science fiction convention while working on his next book. Since the book was written when computers were still a niche market, the modern reader might be confused (or just plain amused) by how tech-illiterate the officer heading the murder investigation is, which results in protagonist Jay Omega (an engineering professor at Virginia Tech) being asked to help out. The officer mentally compares the Techno Babble he hears to wizards casting a spell, and when the murdered author's publisher asks for a copy of the disc with the book on it^note the police want to dust it for prints and he's rightly worried that doing so will destroy the disc, he asks if copying the data would copy the fingerprints as well, though in that case he's clearly joking.
  • The concept is also discussed, since Marion Farley, Jay's love interest and an English professor, agreed to judge the entries for the convention's creative writing contest. One story set in the future has mention of a paper check being used as evidence; Jay remarks that electronic banking is already a thing and will quickly render checks obsolete.
  • The sequel (Zombies of the Gene Pool) has a lesser version, with the murder victim being thought to have died only to suddenly turn up alive. The protagonist goes online to confirm whether the man was really dead, which involves going into an early form of chat room and asking if someone who lives in the same city as the murder victim can confirm (which they do by calling the family on the phone). This can seem ridiculously convoluted, given that in a modern setting all it would have taken was a simple Google search.
• In the Fear Street book The New Girl (first published in 1989) There is a scene where the protagonist and his Heterosexual Life-Partner get locked in a second story classroom at the school, which is otherwise deserted. The hero (who is lucky enough to be a gymnast) has to climb out the window and down a tree in order to open the door from the outside so they can both escape. Nowadays one or both of them would likely have a cellphone and could just call and say they had been locked in.
• Robert A. Heinlein predicted the cellphone but not the lack of courtesy in its use. At the beginning of Space Cadet (Heinlein), the young protagonist receives a call from home. He confirms that he has arrived safely but then says he'll have to hang up because he's in a crowd.
• Jack Reacher: In the first novel, Killing Floor, which was first published in 1997, it's a plot point that cell phone numbers don't have area codes. As anyone can tell you, that is not the case with modern cell phones.
• Moonlight Becomes You was published in 1996 and the technology dates it to that period. Lots of characters use car phones when they're out and about, and hardly anyone owns or uses a cellphone; Neil's storyline in particular would likely have been resolved more quickly if cellphones were a thing, as he could just send Maggie a text if he wanted to contact her, rather than having to travel around trying to find someone who knows Maggie's landline number in Newport. Maggie also has to drop her disposable camera off at a drugstore and wait a few days to get the pictures she took of the cemetery developed; nowadays she could've just taken the pictures with her phone and had instant access to the photos.
• The Robots of Dawn was published in 1983. One of the major events is a situation where the car given to Baley by Dr. Fastolfe breaks down due to sabotage, and the two robots with him must leave to get help. Even with the Spacer dislike for being disturbed, it is hard to imagine today that Fastolfe would have given Baley two robots and a car for his own use, yet left the detective without a way to contact him in case of some problem the robots couldn't help with (a situation which occurred more than once even before the car breakdown). Made even worse by the fact that at the beginning of the novel, Baley is chastised for leaving his police pager at home.

Live-Action TV

In General:

• Game Shows:" Oohs" and "aahs" abounded when a car phone was shown as a prize on many game shows of the 1980s era, including (but not limited to) Wheel of Fortune, Sale of the Century and The Price Is Right. Always, said item was at least $2,500, and on $ale was one of the end-game prizes (during the shopping era).
• The idea of the swingin' bachelor's "little black book" of women to call up was referenced in many '80s and '90s sitcoms, but this has been made obsolete by cell phone "contact lists". This leaves the 2004 film Little Black Book with something of an Artifact Title for younger viewers, as the eponymous item is a PDA, not an actual booklet.
  • Not to mention the fact that, in the years since the film came out, smartphones have supplanted PDAs in almost every professional field.
  • Younger viewers may also be confused as why having the phone number of everyone you know is a signifier of anything at all.

Series:

• 3-2-1 Contact's "The Bloodhound Gang" stories would have been much different if the gang had access to smartphones. For instance, the villain in "The Case of the Dead Man's Pigeon", would have been thwarted in seconds with one look through Wikipedia at the will reading instead of one of them running to call the Audubon Society.
• 7th Heaven: Reverend Eric Camden had a pager for the entirety of the series, even when people were ditching those for cell phones. Granted, the Camden family were on a strict budget, so it partially justifies this. It wasn't until the last three seasons where the technology (kind of) was keeping up with the times, but that's not saying much.
• In an episode of Absolutely Fabulous, Edina calls her daughter Saffron's cellphone, which goes off in a university lecture theatre. All the students and the lecturer check to see if it's their phone, to much laughter. The joke suggests that the students are all spoiled rich kids, but also acknowledges increasing phone ownership.
• Angel. In order to hand-wave it, they explained it as Angel being a cranky old man unwilling to adapt to new technology. Also, bad coverage.
• One of the reasons the 1960s Batman show used the Bat-phone far more than the more well-known Bat-signal was because it was supposed to be cool that Batman would have a phone in his car and would let the show seem more high-tech. More recent comic storylines even lampshaded this, with Commissioner Gordon asking if he could just have Batman's cell phone number instead of having to turn on the Bat-signal every time he needed help.
• The Brady Bunch: Before cell phones and smartphones, there was pay telephones. These all-but-obsolete devices make up a large part of the plots of two first-season episodes: "Sorry, Wrong Number" (where Mike installs a pay phone inside the house to teach his kids phone-related lessons) and "Tiger, Tiger" (where the family dog runs off and the family – making liberal use of pay telephones – work with Carol and Alice to track the pooch down). The former episode could easily be re-written today, with Mike being frustrated that his kids are running up cell phone bills, going "over their minutes" on their family plans and so forth; "Tiger, Tiger" has, among other reasons, become a relic of its time, as the use of other modern technologies (such as vehicle navigation systems and GPS-chipped dog collars) has also come into play along with cellular phones and smartphones.
• The cast of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which ran from 1997 to 2003, would have been saved from many a scrape if they'd just had cellphones. Quite a few episodes use a character being in peril and unable to contact Buffy as a plot device. This wasn't a big deal in the earlier seasons, but the show hit it big just as cellphones were starting to become mainstream, so after a few years it began to seem rather odd, especially since the cast was full of teenagers (later, young adults), the group most likely to carry a cellphone. This was lampshaded at the start of the final season (in September 2002) when Buffy gives her sister Dawn "a weapon" to help protect herself, which turns out to be a cellphone. From then on most of the cast had cellphones — although ironically, they hardly ever needed to use them, since that season also saw every single character move into Buffy's house. One episode reveals that Giles does indeed own a pager, joking that they should page him if the apocalypse happens when he's not around.'
  • Indeed, the 2018 comic reboot of the series altered many early season show plots by having Sunnydale students using the Internet, Twitter and other modern technology.
• Cheers: In 1988 episode "Those Lips, Those Ice", Frasier brags about his "portable cellular telephone". He totes it around in a small briefcase.
• In Community episode "Pascal's Triangle Revisited", Britta points out they don't live in a Jane Austen novel and can use cell phones to stay in touch over the summer.
• Doctor Who:
  • The classic series story "The Invasion" predicts a future where everyone has videophones, but everyone still has to go through an operator to collect their calls. This is briefly relevant to the plot when a mid-Villainous Breakdown Tobias Vaughn is forced to affect a smooth and flirtatious manner while making a phone call so the operator doesn't suspect anything's amiss.
  • When the series returned to TV in 2005, one major piece of day-to-day technology that didn't exist when it was last on TV in 1989 was the personal cell/mobile phone. The series acknowledged this by having the companions and the Doctor begin to use them too, with the Doctor "upgrading" their friends' phones to make and receive calls throughout time and space. Once made a big deal of, this is now taken as a given for any ongoing character. Due to the revival itself now having Long Runner status, the phones upgraded by the Doctor back in 2005 are considered well outdated compared to Clara's iPhone of 2015 — as evidenced by the fact that several episodes broadcast in 2015 show her using real-life features of the iPhone that did not even exist for mobile devices in 2005.
• The first season of Due South (1994) had Fraser track a drug dealer by triangulating the signals from the cell phone towers the dealer's cell phone was using. The script establishes Fraser's solution as innovative and clever, and has Fraser's partner loudly doubt that it will work. Cell phones weren't very common in 1994, and it wasn't common knowledge that they even could be tracked. Today, it's routinely done; and using triangulation is neither a quaint relic (Fraser introduces the idea as "the way we used to track caribou up north") nor especially obscure. In fact many modern Smart Phones can use the same technique as a local GPS equivalent.
• In an episode of Ellen, she and her friends are in a limo and one of the characters wants to call someone to brag that she's calling from a limo, and another character retorts "Do you think Steven Spielberg calls his friends saying "Guess where I'm calling from!"
• A big pointer to French sitcom Les Filles d'à côté dating from the middle 1990's is the unbelievably massive size of the mobile phones used by the characters. Fanny is seen to reach intro her bag and bring out a massive brick with an extending aerial, reminiscent of a World War II walkie-talkie. If nothing else remids you this is 1994-95... this does.
• In the early seasons of Frasier, there are frequent references to pagers, and Niles is the only one of the cast wealthy (and pretentious) enough to have a cellular phone (his first one isn't quite a brick, but you can watch cell phone technology change with his upgrades). One episode even highlights how relatively rare the devices were when Frasier notes that a recently arrived professional juggler must have been contacted on her "car phone", prompting Niles' near slack-jawed shock that "Street performers have car phones?!" Of course, most of the various "Fawlty Towers" Plot styled antics wouldn't have worked quite the same if the characters could just call each other at any time.
  • A seventh season episode has Roz enthused by the fact that Café Nervosa has put in a phone line to allow people with (rather clunky) laptops to go online.
• The infamous breakup in Friends would have not happened, or would have been resolved in a few hours, instead of 7 seasons, if Ross and Rachel had cellphones, with Ross trying to confirm to Rachel if they were 'really on a break' or not.
• Acknowledged In-Universe in Frequency. 2016 cop Raimy Sullivan finds herself able to communicate via ham radio to her late father Frank in 1996. They work together to solve some cases with a recurring bit being Raimy forgetting that things she takes for granted didn't exist in 1996.
  • Frank complains about not having a camera on him at a crime scene. When Raimy asks what was wrong with his phone, Frank is confused what a phone has to do with a camera.
  • It takes Raimy a bit to realize that even the most cutting-edge CSI lab of 1996 would be the equivalent of a 2016 high school chemistry club, meaning Frank doesn't have the tools to properly process evidence like Raimy can.
  • Raimy is briefly thrown when Frank mentions having to use things like a fax machine or a pager.
  • Played for laughs when Raimy mentions getting info off the Internet while talking to Frank and he responds "wow, your dial-up is fast!"
• Agent 86's Shoe Phone in Get Smart, which was a parody of spy film gadgeteering to begin with.
• Ghostwriter was about a group of kids who solved mysteries with the help of a ghost who could communicate with them by rearranging letters. Distance was no issue and the kids could write messages to each other without being in the same place. A cellphone could have produced many of the same results. ^note One thing they wouldn't be able to duplicate would be his ability to read and repeat any sort of information in the form of text, including digitally. In other words, a modern GW would be more akin to the NSA.
• Neil Gaiman had a bit of a pickle while writing the 2019 miniseries adaptation of Good Omens, as a fairly major plot point of the 1990 novel involves an answering machine, and he felt uneasy about changing too much of his late co-writer Terry Pratchett's work. The series ends up still using the answering machine, which is now said to be an antique that the demon Crowley took a liking to among other pieces of human technology, and he also makes use of his cell phone in the same scene.
• How I Met Your Mother: Before Marshall and Lily's wedding in 2007, Brad accidentally injuries the photographer and offers to take pictures of the ceremony with his camera phone instead, much to Lilly's horror. Modern audiences used to smartphones that take high resolution images won't understand that back then the quality of a camera phone picture to that of a regular camera was laughable.
• I Shouldn't Be Alive: Almost all of these episodes were uploaded to YouTube, and have multiple people poiting out that they should have cell phones. A good portion of the stories took place in The '90s or the Turn of the Millennium (Literally only one story takes place in The New '10s), when cell phones were not only less commonplace as they are now, but also suffered from poor reception. On occasion the survivors have pointed out that they were stupid for having not taken it with them, or mentioned that it was lost and/or broken due to the fact some of these stories deal with plane crashes or shipwrecks.
• JAG: In "Sightings", Harm asks a ten year old girl: Do you know how to operate a cellular phone?
• Law & Order: Invoked practically by name by Don Cragen in "Wedded Bliss" (Season 3, Episode 5, original airdate October 21, 1992) when he is telling Phil Ceretta about a new way the FBI has to help ID a victim.
  CRAGEN: The march of technology, Phil, sometimes it works.
• Invoked In-Universe in both Life on Mars (2006) and its American remake as modern cop Sam Tyler finds himself in 1973 and has to handle a world without cell phones, computers, internet and more.
  • Both versions have a scene in the pilot of Sam at a crime lab, asking the routine question of "what came back from the DNA results?" He sees everyone staring at him as if he's speaking gibberish as he realizes he's in a time when a simple fingerprint check can take a week and even lab techs barely understand different blood types.
  • The U.S. version plays more on Sam complaining about having to constantly carry change for pay phones, unable to leave someone a voice message and having to physically change the dial on his TV which only gets five channels.
• Little House on the Prairie: Although filmed in the 1970s and early 1980s, there are abundant examples of the early workings of technological marvels that we take for granted today in these episodes, set in the late 1870s and early 1880s. The telephone is first referenced in Season 4's "Whisper Country", where Mary explains to the family the new invention called the telephone. Season 5's "The Godsister" saw Charles work on a crew installing telephone line; and in Season 6's "Crossed Connections", the contraption is seen in use. All episodes were set circa 1880, which was about the time some smaller communities started to get connected.
• The "cutting-edge" technology seen in Miami Vice is quite funny to look at in retrospect. Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs have to pose as undercover drug dealers for the purposes of their job, and subsequently have access to all the latest tools and technology. The series establishes this early on in the third episode, with a scene shot solely to emphasize the fact that Crockett has a car phone (and the receiver looks like a giant brick).
• In the pilot episode of the short-lived Mayim Bialik show Molloy, the title character's father buys a fancy sports car. Part of the big excitement about the vehicle is the fact that the car has its own phone; Molloy's selfish stepsister even calls the house on it and tries to get her mother to bring breakfast out to the car.
• The first episode of The Prisoner (1967) uses a cordless phone as an eerie, impossible-seeming device that the protagonist does a double take at. Though it does still have an odd Zeerust design so nowadays it can seem like that's what he's noticing.
• Read All About It had a bulky communicator about the size of a small beverage cooler that sends text messages in 1983. It's redeemed by its extraordinary range that not only reaches vast instances without the need of a cell network, but also can communicate into different time periods, perfect when you've been thrown centuries into the past via accidental Time Travel.
• Rescue 911's cases were all taken from The '80s and The '90s, and a lot could have been made much easier with cell phones. however; during that time frame, cell phones were expensive, bulky, and all around uncommon.
  • The show itself caused this: quite a few segments showed people in distress because their local region did not have 911 as an emergency number and the person making the titular call would have to find the phone number for their service. The popularity of the show caused the system to become universal in the United States.
  • One segment was featured because the use of cutting edge technology. A woman driving down the high way was approached by an unmarked police car, but the "officer" was acting weird. He was showing his badge, motioning her to pull over, and had no sirens. The woman used her car phone to call 911 to let them know that she was complying with the officer but wanted to drive to a public place because she was uneasy with the behavior... only to learn from the police they had no unmarked cars in the area and that was not protocol for their operation. The real police responding continually talked about how it was only cause the woman had her cutting edge car phone that this was a happy ending.
  • One episode shows a woman noticing people breaking into her house run to call 911. She at first grabs the rotary phone (still actually existed in the '90s!) but decides it takes too long, before going to the digital phone.
  • Another episode about a five year old girl finding her house empty. What normally happened was that she rode the bus to another school where her mom would pick her up. However; instead that day, her friend's parents gave her a ride home, and word didn't make it to her mother, who was at the other school. Nowadays; her friend's parents would surely have called her mom's cell phone if they were going to drive her home. Or, if she came home and found it empty, she should have thought to call her mom's cell phone to tell her she was home.
  • One case did involve a cell phone — and you can see just how big they were at the time.
• In a Saturday Night Live Weekend Update, Kevin Nealon says "And a recent study indicates that cellular phone users may be more likely to develop brain tumors. The problem has gotten very little public attention, however, since most people don't care if people who use cellular phones die." Probably wouldn't get that much applause now.
• Zack in Saved by the Bell has a cellphone in High School in 1991-1992. The joke at the time was that this kid is such a High-School Hustler that he's able to invest in a tool associated with big-shot executives. Now it's the size of the thing that's the joke.
• Seinfeld relies a lot on Poor Communication Kills, with various characters' inability to communicate vital information causing an unending series of humorous escapades. One memorable example would be George's frustration at being unable to use a pay phone at a Chinese restaurant because a patron is hogging it.
  • Another episode, "The Junior Mint" has Jerry not remembering the actual name of a woman he's dating and trying different antics to find it out. This would be impossible nowadays not only due to social media but because even the mere fact that her name has to be in the caller ID when she calls to his cell phone would prevent it.
• A minor example from Sherlock episode A Study in Pink, in which a room full of journalists and police officers receive simultaneously texts while in a press conference. It is framed as something out of the ordinary and a character wanders how does he do it, but the trick loses its luster since it was only a few years away from multiple text sending being commonplace.
• This is seen in Switched at Birth; texting is the go-to means of communication among the main cast with the Deaf characters all having smartphones (specifically iPhones) with video-chat functions. Carlton School and some of the more established Deaf households have TTY/TDD machines (which could transmit text to each other over landlines but require a relay service for communicating with regular phones); these sit unused, being a clunky special-needs workaround obsoleted by the above-mentioned mainstream tech.
• Parodied in That '80s Show, where at one point (and heavily used in the commercials) one of the characters is in a bar, yelling into a big gray brick "Guess what? I'm calling on a portable phone! No not a pay phone, a portable phone!" While cell phones were obviously not the ubiquitous devices they are now, they weren't mysterious space-gadgets and most folks would at least understand the concept.
• VR Troopers pretty much LIVES in either this trope or Zeerust as a whole nowadays, but the introduction of the VRVT devices really stands out, as Ryan remarks that it's a problem that they can't communicate with one another at a distance, prompting Professor Hart to reveal the communication devices. Nowadays, you get the exact same result by Facetiming on a cell phone, something that they all certainly would have access to today.
• A good one from The West Wing: Bartlet sees Leo after not being able to get in touch with him when he needed him, and does a little sarcastic speech about how "if only there was some sort of telephonic device with a personalized number we could call... perhaps it would look something like this, Mr. Moto," he says, pulling Leo's pager off his belt.
  • Though this was also because Leo was old; most of the staff used and were comfortable with cell phones from the pilot onward, even in the flashbacks.

Music

• Sheeler & Sheeler's 1990 parody of "Convoy", "Car Phone", is doubly dated: not only does it praise a type of phone which is long since obsolete, but it describes people freely using them while driving — even to call the highway patrol and report a drunk driver — without any suspicion that doing so will soon be illegal.
• The coke dealer who narrates Steely Dan's 1980 song "Glamour Profession" subtly brags about having a car phone ("When it's all over / We'll make some calls from my car / We're a star"), as a benefit of having high-end customers like pro athletes. By the late 1990s, even street-level dealers had their own cellphones.
• The video of Savage Garden's 'Truly Madly Deeply' follows two lovers who failed to meet because one of them was running late. They rush through the city of Paris to find each other. This would have been solved in seconds with cellphones.
• Though it isn't about life before cell phones, "Weird Al" Yankovic's "First-World Problems" has the narrator getting mad that somebody actually called him on his cell phone, since in the 2010s and onward, almost everyone communicates pretty much exclusively through text messaging and social media.
• Erykah Badu's 1997 Break-Up Song "Tyrone" has the final line, "You need to call Tyrone/But you can't use my phone" made more sense as a punchline in the '90s because it was likely that the narrator's boyfriend didn't have his own phone to use, thus the line is basically telling him to get out of her house. These days, the boyfriend could just pull out his cell phone.
• Maroon 5's song "Pay Phone" is about a guy trying to call his ex-girlfriend. It would have made sense in The '90s or earlier, before the widespread availability of cell phones and the subsequent decomissioning of many pay phones. Even if, say, she isn't answering calls from his cell phone and that's why he's calling her from a public phone, it would likely take him a long time in The New '10s to find a pay phone and even longer to find one that actually still works. (And there's no guarantee she'd still answer, because it would likely show up on her caller ID as "unavailable" or "unknown," which many people these days read as "telemarketer or other nuisance call.")
• New Politics' 2013 hit "Harlem" includes the line "Making a movie on the couch with a flip phone". Even then, flip phones had been overtaken by smartphones, dating the song a good decade.
• Whitney Houston's 1998 Break Up Song "It's Not Right, But It's Okay" included the line, "The phone rings then you turn and look at me/ You said it was one of your friends down on 54th Street/ So why did 213 show up on your caller ID?!" 213 is a Los Angeles area code, and she is calling the man out on his lie that he was talking to a friend in New York City. That logic may have made sense in the late 90's when phone numbers were still local and tied to homes, but people are now able to keep their number when relocating and/or changing service providers, so it's not at all unusual for someone to move to a new city and take their old number with them.
• The end of Pink Floyd's "Young Lust", from 1979's The Wall, features a collect call, years before cellphones and the decline of the payphone led to a dramatic reduction in use of collect calling.
• In an example that was already obsolete when the song came out, "No, No, No" by Eve (Rapper) opens with her rewinding her answering machine to listen to a message. By 2001, answering machines were using digital memory in place of cassettes.
• In the 1999 Destiny's Child song "Bug A Boo," which is about dating a stalker, the chorus is a time capsule of 90's communication technology:
  You make me wanna throw my pager out the window^note Within 10 years of this song's release, improved cell phone technology would render pagers obsolete for everyday use.
  Tell MCI to cut the phone poles^note Landlines have also been superseded by cell phones, plus MCI was bought out by Verizon in 2006.
  Break my lease so I can move
  'Cause you a bug a boo, a bug a boo, a bug a boo
  I wanna put your number on the call block^note To block a number back then you had to call the phone company, a much more complex task than the block feature that's standard on cell phones today.
  Have AOL make my email stop^note Not only do people rarely use email to socialize anymore, but most people today prefer free hosts like Gmail or Yahoo for personal use rather than the email that comes with (and is tied to) their internet service provider. Also AOL has long since faded to irrelevance.
  'Cause you a bug a boo, a bug a boo

Tabletop Games

• Lampshaded in one of the examples in the 5th edition Champions genre book. A villain cuts the phone lines to isolate the bank he's robbing, and everyone trapped by his mooks immediately goes for their cell phones.
• The first couple of editions of Shadowrun had "The Crash" to explain using the Internet as a 3D virtual reality network. After cellphones and wifi became commonplace, the later editions added "The Second Crash", changing everything to wireless, since searching for a terminal to plug in to started seeming a bit ridiculous...
• In addition to the Shadowrun example above, Cyberpunk 2020 was also hit quite hard in what refers to communications. Not only cell phones are of the dumb variety and much closer to the Real Life brick phones of The '80s than the current pocketable ones, but also there's nothing resembling a smartphone.
  • This changes in Cyberpunk Red. While the 'net may still be unsafe territory due to a massive virus infestation and most cities have to rely on municipal-only networks, most people have "agents," which can be used to call others, track schedules, make purchases, play games, etc.

Theatre

• Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1980 one-woman song cycle Tell Me on a Sunday now shows its age because the protagonist's letters to her mother are sent through the regular mail rather than email or texting. Though updates were made for the 2003 production, it could be argued that the story doesn't work as well in a modern setting. Leaving one's family and moving to another country would have been a much bigger deal in the '80s (and earlier) when the cost of long-distance phone calls was high and it took days to receive a letter in the mail. Now the protagonist could text her family or even have a live video chat with them anytime.
• The plot of Alan Ayckbourn's 1969 farce How the Other Half Loves is partly driven by landline phone calls being answered by someone else in the same house as the person whom the caller was trying to reach. This would not occur in the era of everyone having their own cellphone.

Video Games

• Grand Theft Auto:
  • Grand Theft Auto 2, which is set in 20 Minutes into the Future, resorts to using phone booths as points where the player receives missions (as is in earlier GTA games). Being a game that incorporates Zeerust aesthetics, though, this bit of detail can be forgiven as being a stylistic choice.
  • Pay phones and pagers are the only communication devices used by the player in Grand Theft Auto III, a game set as late as 2001. While it's lampshaded in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas that the main character of GTA III is implied to be a man of few words, it doesn't fully explain how silent characters from both the first Grand Theft Auto (set in the late 1990s) and Grand Theft Auto London (set in the 1960s) also receive calls on mobile phones or walkie-talkies. Grand Theft Auto Advance (set a year before GTA III) is a similar offender.
  • Grand Theft Auto IV expands on the capabilities of the phone with SMS messaging, a camera and custom ringtones. Unfortunately the game was released in 2008 when smartphones were still a novelty, meaning that for Internet you still had to go to an Internet café. Thankfully it's not frequent, but playing the game in modern days does get some annoyance that you can't just pull out your phone to browse the Web on the spot.
• L.A. Noire requires the player to call up dispatch on various phones, often using the witness or suspect's house phone without asking permission, in order to research names and information. The speed with which the clerk finds such information matches the speed of a Google search, however.
• Leisure Suit Larry 5: Passionate Patti Does a Little Undercover Work: Trying and failing to use the taxi's cell phone makes the narrator mention that all his life, Larry wanted to try out a cell phone. The game came out in 1991, about 10 years before mobile phones and 20 years before smartphones started being commonplace.
• Surprisingly enough, Mega Man Battle Network actually invoked this trope — Lan carries a device that has a cell phone functionality.
• Averted in Scarface: The World Is Yours. Tony snags a box-shaped cell phone off the body of a high-level henchman early on in the game, and uses it to call various people throughout the rest of the story. Several characters (including Tony himself) reference how rare and top-of-the-line the phone is, and how lucky he is to have one.
• In the first WarioWare game, 2003's Mega Microgame$!, the framing device of Jimmy T.'s stage is messages being left on his cell phone, which is a flip phone with an antenna. In 2018's WarioWare Gold, the framing device of Jimmy T.'s stage is two girls taking pictures of him and his afro kitty using smartphones, with a camera in the corner and only one button on the front. Additionally, the game has three different phones you can earn from the Capsule Machine to dial Phone Codes with; Wario's rotary phone, 9-Volt's home phone, and Jimmy's cell phone, which in this title has been updated to a modern smartphone with a touchscreen.
• Played with in Yakuza 0, which takes place in the late 80's, and thus has pay phones aplenty (which even function as save points.) However, there is one NPC who's overly proud of his expensive, cutting edge, but incredibly heavy, fragile and impractical bag phone. He boasts about how bag-phones are the future and will eventually get lighter and more portable, and could even come with other non-phone functions like the ability to take pictures, all of which Majima scoffs at.

Webcomics

• Similar to the Weird Al example above, in Dumbing of Age, when a character isn't responding to texts, the other characters get worried and try calling them, which doesn't fare any better. When the character finally shows up, Walky is outraged.
  Walky: You made me use my phone like a phone!
  • In a 2023 strip, Walky and Sal's parents show up for a surprise visit. Except it wasn't supposed to be a surprise, because they had emailed Walky well in advance to let him know they were coming. Sal is furious that Walky knew they were coming and didn't tell her, to which Walky says that he didn't know, as he regards email as an outdated form of communication similar to phone calls and, as such, never reads them.
    Walky: I don't read Mom's emails! They're emails! They're the phone calls of the internet!
• Grrl Power: A minor example, related to the ubiquity of smartphones and cameras. Mention is made of a super with Flight, who exclusively uses his abilities to rescue trapped hikers and others in danger far from civilization. There were plans to make a tv show about him, but this fell through because following him around with a fleet of camera helicopters defeats the purpose of having one man who can do it much more easily. The comic started in 2010, right when body cams were starting to appear in the public eye; giving one to the super would be a non-traditional way of filming, but it would work well enough. Furthermore, hikers and campers have started using GoPro cameras to film their own adventures, so you might be able to get a significant amount of footage just from the people he rescued.
• Invoked in xkcd, with a graph and a comment suggesting that the increasing prevalence of phone cameras makes it implausible that phenomena like flying saucers, ghosts, and unknown large animals could exist without definitive evidence being produced by now.

Web Original

• Dropout is on this trope very extensively:
  • This video demonstrates a number of cases where a movie plot conflict could easily be eliminated or the story shortened because characters had cell phones to call for help/look up information/reveal information to people that had been withheld from them/etc.
    • In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet gets the message to Romeo that she will fake her own death, instead of the miscommunication caused by a plague outbreak that closed the road.
    • The Home Alone clip shows Kevin being called by his mother right after he finds himself all alone, and she tells him to go to a friend's house — which if done in the actual movie would have reduced the running time to about 45 minutes. Except for the fact that this doesn't explain how then booby trapping the house to stop Harry and Marv would work.
  • And this video shows similar examples of plot conflicts being resolved because the characters had the ability to go on the Internet:
    • For example, in Basic Instinct, the damning evidence against Catherine Trammell is that Nick Curran looks at her Internet search history that indicates she's been reading websites with information about how to use an ice pick as a murder weapon. ^note While several criminals have been caught this way, someone with a little forethought and knowledge would've just used Incognito/Private Mode, which is now standard on all mainstream modern browsers.
    • The plot twist of The Sixth Sense (that Malcolm Crowe has been Dead All Along) wouldn't be a surprise because he'd be looking himself up on the Internet when Cole asks him if he's a certified doctor.
  • This video continues the concept with smartphones:
    • In The Usual Suspects, the reveal that Verbal Kint is Keyser Soze would come simply by Agent Kujan looking up Keyser Soze's Facebook page.
    • The revelation in Citizen Kane that Rosebud was the name of a popular brand of sleds would come from a simple Wikipedia search.
• The "Technology Ruins Romance" series by Wong Fu Productions.
• Cracked's 6 Technologies Conspicuously Absent From Sci-Fi Movies explores technologies widely available when several well-known science fiction films were first published that would have completely broken their plots: bicycles, night vision goggles, unmanned combat vehicles, Wi-Fi, GPS, and cell phones.
• ClickHole parodies examinations of this trope with "7 Classic ’80s Movies That Would Have Been Over In 5 Minutes If Cell Phones Had Existed", which shows that cell phones would resolve the plots by being used as lethal weapons.

Western Animation

• Arthur has this a lot in the early seasons, which were made at a time when a cellphone was something not everyone had access to:
  • One episode had Muffy, the rich girl, the only character who had access to a cell phone.
  • There was another episode from the same decade that had Arthur lost downtown and had no cellphone to easily remedy this.
  • "Locked in the Library!" from the first season would have been over much quicker if Arthur and Francine called or texted their family members from their cell phones.
  • The season five episode "Double Dare" has Francine miss Arthur and Buster's telephone call (to her home line), where they tell her they've decided not to go through with the dare that had previously been set up, and she misses their call due since her headphones were on at the time. In today's world, they would simply message her by text, and their communication would almost certainly not be missed.
• Family Guy has both instances of this, in the pre-cancellation episodes
  • One of which aired in 2002, "Brian Wallows and Peter's Swallows", has Brian singing a song to a shut-in about all the modern things she's missed over the last 40 years. One of the things he sings about is that a guy with a cell phone would make everyone think "that guy's life must rule!".
    • The song also depicts the guy developing a tumour as a result of excessive cell phone usage - a fear that has been handily quashed.
  • There's an episode from earlier in the same season where the Griffins go to Hollywood and Peter gets a cell phone to communicate with Brian. Brian is amazed that Peter has access to such a device.
  • In "When You Wish Upon a Weinstein", the plot kicks off when the Jewish man Peter wished for asks to use the Griffins' phone because his car broke down. These days, he could call a tow truck using his cell phone.
• The Simpsons:
  • "Bart Gets Famous" (1994) had Bart given one only because he was Krusty's assistant. If the episode aired today, the joke of an elementary school student answering a phone in class wouldn't be as funny.
  • Towards the end of "Homer Badman" (1994), Marge's line "As long as everyone keeps filming one another, justice will be done." was a joke. Since then, cell phones with built-in cameras have become commonplace, making it possible to film various transgressions and incidents.
  • In "Lard of the Dance" (1998), new student Alex Whitney has a cell phone; it serves as an indicator of how mature and grown-up she is, or at least is attempting to act.
• Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law, as in the page regarding computers, does this again with cell phones to parody the Jetsons' quaintness. George proudly shows off a cell phone almost as tall as him as one of their 'technological marvels', which is promptly lampshaded when Peanut pulls out his pocket-sized cell phone.
• Played with in an episode of The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy, where Billy tries desperately to make a successful prank call, but everyone in his house has Caller ID, which hilariously even contains his personal information. After even wearing a costume to not be recognized and failing, Billy looks in Grim's trunk for some way to beat caller ID, and discovers the dangerous Phone of Cthulhu.
• Futurama
  • Inverted as a new invention has rendered cell phones obsolete, and people no longer need to carry them to all places. This incredible invention of the year 3010? Phone booths!
  • Played straight when Amy has a cell-phone about the size of her thumbnail, which she has accidentally swallowed. At the time of the episode, phones kept getting smaller and this was the parodied conclusion. Now we use phones with touchscreens and iPads, so there is a push towards larger screens and phones keep getting slimmer to fit in your pocket, so the joke is obsolete.
• Lampshaded in the Rocko's Modern Life special Static Cling, with Rocko baffled by the O-Phone:
  Rocko: This is a phone? But where are all the buttons?
  • Even back in The '90s, Rocko had a phone with a rotary dial. That had become obsolete by that decade, thanks to touch-tone phones, which are easier to use.

Real Life

• This trope played a large role in the United States becoming as big as it is. At the time when the Mississippi River served as the country's western border and the entirety of what is now the Midwest was owned by France, President Thomas Jefferson sent some agents to discuss buying a small part of it for $10 million with Emperor Napoleon.^note $230,291,150.44 adjusted for inflation. As luck would have it, Napoleon was currently at war with England and desperately needed money, so he countered that he would sell the entire territory for $15 million.^note $345,436,725.66 adjusted for inflation. However, he was notorious for abruptly changing his mind, and the agents were worried that he might say the whole deal was off by the time their update made it across the ocean and new orders from Jefferson came back, so they simply accepted it on their own.
• People sometimes say that instantaneous communication didn't exist before the Internet or cellphones. But it did, since 1837, and certainly since 1876. The first transatlantic telegraph line was built in 1858, and public pay phones were introduced in 1902. Kennedy conspiracy theorists posit that Walter Cronkite couldn't have gotten the initial news within scant minutes of the shooting. There was a telephone in the press car. Merriman Smith grabbed it the moment he heard the shots.^note He was a hunter and gun expert, so he could immediately distinguish gunshots from firecrackers. He spoke to local UPI, which transmitted to UPI teletypes everywhere, including CBS. Four minutes, tops. And it would have been sooner if it hadn't been for the news bureaus all sending at once, fouling up the UPI transmission. ABC Radio News broke in at 12:36, four minutes before Cronkite at 12:40, as Smith continued to phone in bulletins from the hospital.
• This was mentioned in a true-crime documentary about an unsolved homicide of a taxi driver near Edinburgh in 1983. Two teenage witnesses who saw the crime in progress cycled two miles to a nearby hotel to get to a telephone. One of the original case detectives observed that had mobile telephones been common then, the police would have been alerted much sooner and the perpetrator perhaps would've been caught.
• Many older people mention that if someone got on the wrong train or off at the wrong bus stop, they'd have to hope that the person they missed either waited for them or followed them to the right station or stop. Could go very very wrong if people's instincts were different.
• Many people today still don't wholly understand how profound the consequences of the cell phone age are. For example, lots of people still routinely get outraged to see homeless people with cell phones, thinking that they're enjoying an undeserved luxury, without stopping to notice how cheap prepaid cell phone service is these days, how pay phones have largely disappeared due to the ubiquity of cell phones, or more important, how valuable a phone can be to a homeless person. Cell phones mean that the homeless can now leave callback numbers for interviews or odd jobs, dial 911 anywhere they are, call their family and friends, etc. There are actually charities that accept used cell phones as donations and give them to the homeless.
  • Not to mention programs like MyGovernmentCellPhone, which provide free cell phone service to anyone on federal aid (Medicaid, food stamps, and the like) or below the poverty line. The Lifeline programs — federally funded, administered by local telephone companies — were actually started by Ronald Reagan, hardly a liberal "handout" guy. People need to keep in mind that many people on assistance are employed — including homeless people, who just don't make enough to afford rent. These programs are also extremely valuable to seniors who are often living on fixed incomes.
  • This point is raised in Polly Toynbee's book Hard Work, about minimum wage jobs in the UK, in relation to unemployed people having mobile phones. She points out that if you're looking for work you need to have access to your phone at all times: one missed call from an employment agency and a potential job opportunity is lost.
    • Barbara Ehrenreich, trying to see if you could really earn a living wage working incognito at low-end jobs in 2000^note If she'd tried to do this project a few years later, she wouldn't have been able to., often used pay phones for this purpose. The hole-in-the-wall "apartments" she could afford either had no phones or charged extra for them.
  • Along these lines, in some very poor developing countries, cell phones are more ubiquitous than most people from developed countries would imagine, because it has been cheaper to set up cell towers than to finish the extremely arduous task of running additional landlines to remote or poorly maintained areas. Phones also allow merchants to check that they're not being ripped off, learn the best methods of growing crops, and remain in contact with their customers. More info here.
    • Increasingly cheaper smartphones and affordable data plans mean low-income families might even prioritize their purchases above others since their practical utility and entertainment value can easily exceed other items traditionally considered cheap such as small televisions, toys, or newspaper subscriptions. During the COVID-19 Pandemic when schools were forced to conduct remote learning, those who didn't have any smartphone in the household were forced to purchase one for their school-age children, which in turn introduced them to the possibilities offered by smartphones.
• Many people have a similar reaction to children with cell phones, believing them spoiled, not realizing that a phone lets them keep in touch with their parents (and vice versa), call the emergency services wherever they are, and talk to their friends without tying up the house phone. They're also essentially the modern version of handhelds such as the Game Boy and Nintendo DS (except that microtransactions let kids bleed their parents' bank accounts dry rapidly, rather than in chunks for each new game, and give away personal information).
• Before cell phones were widespread someone who owned one and called the local emergency number from their cell phone while they were traveling might have been connected to an emergency operator hundreds of miles away from where they were. Before the American GPS and Russian GLONASS global positioning systems were available to civilians (not to mention the EU's Galileo, a system built for civilian use from the get-go), cell phone calls were routed by the caller's area code and emergency operators would then have had to relay information to the local emergency responders.
• Wristwatches are falling out of style these days, as most people simply check the display on their phones. But didn't wristwatches replace such pocket watches in the first place?
  • In David McCullough's book The Johnstown Flood the author mentions this trope in action as he interviewed survivors of the 1889 flood in the 1960s — some people he interviewed mentioned knowing the time of the flood by looking at their wristwatches, however wristwatches didn't become popular until the 1920s, 30 years later. Over the years they had become so accustomed to wearing them, they assumed they had them at the time of the flood.
  • The 6th generation iPod Nano capitalizes on its small, square formfactor with a clip that accessory makers make wristbands for it so said iPod can become a watch. Not to mention there are dedicated wristwatches with cell phone functions like Dick Tracy, made practical through bluetooth tech.
  • Lampshaded by this Jack-in-the-Box ad.
  • Wristwatches rapidly gained favor over pocket watches during the First World War, as large-scale, synchronized artillery and infantry attacks made quickly accessible timepieces a practical necessity; indeed, the first "wristwatches" were just pocket watches attached to a leather bracelet. (Such a bracelet is also more rugged than the traditional and rather flimsy watch chain, which is no small consideration given the many rigors of trench warfare.) Wartime utility later gave rise to civilian fashion, which survived for as long as it did primarily because even a mechanical timepiece could easily be made small and simple enough for convenient wear on the wrist; with the advent of modern miniaturization, and the consequent popularity of pocket phones which can keep track of time alongside their many other functions, the wristwatch came to be regarded as more or less redundant. Whether smartwatches can reverse this trend remains to be seen.
  • It should be noted that wristwatches are making a comeback (if they ever really went away in the first place, which is debatable at best) in workplaces and other settings where regular cell phone use is either seen as being impractical, unprofessional, or outright impossible, and wall-mounted clocks aren't widely used for whatever reason. A good example of this is in the food service industry, especially when dealing with national or multinational chains. In addition, many modern-day wristwatches are smartwatches that operate in conjunction with smartphones.
  • The last two decades have seen the emergence of the smartwatch, wristwatches that cram in additional features typically found on computers and cell phones. Early smartwatches resembled PDAs and had limited functionality, but the last several years have seen smartwatches that can connect to a cell phone, allowing users to make calls, read messages, and even run simplified apps. The most prominent examples are the Apple Watch series, Samsung's Galaxy Watch, and Fitbit's fitness-focused line.
• For the most part the actual telephone dial◊ became obsolete by the 1980s, but the term 'dialing' survives.
• The term "hanging up", for that matter. Hanging a receiver on a hook (instead of putting it unto the cradle) died even earlier that the rotary dial, except for certain wall-mounted phones, which still have a specially designed cradle, rather than an exposed hook, and maybe certain pay phones. An actually "hook" that held the receiver and also functioned as the switch control for accessing the network was generally used on wall-mount rotary phones. Rotary desktop phones generally had a button in the handset cradle that performed the same function. Interestingly, while modern residential touchtone phones (early models often just replaced the rotary dial with the touchtone pad) usually use something more sophisticated and harder to bypass (like a magnetic sensor and an embedded magnet in the handset), many professional phones retain a physical switch as well as adding external software control of this function, so office workers of different types can control their phone in the way best suited to the work they are doing.
• While still around, highway call boxes are starting to fade out due to the proliferation of cellphones. A lot of call boxes still get active maintenance, though, especially in deserted areas where cell signal is spotty or nonexistent. The dispatcher would also know exactly where you are without having to wait for cell tower or GPS triangulation from the caller. Call boxes are also useful on college campuses (where students are always getting robbed of their phones, or misplacing them during wild nights out), suicide hot-spots (in case the perpetrator intentionally leaves their cell phone behind and suddenly has second thoughts), if you need help immediately (cell phone emergency calls usually have to go through a statewide highway patrol dispatcher first, who has to first figure out where you are, then route your call to the appropriate local station), if you survive and escape a car accident and your phone is still in your possibly dangerous-to-go-back-into vehicle or if your cell phone just dies on you.
  • In the UK, SOS call boxes on Motorways remain very much in use. They appear every mile, on either side of the carriageway, meaning you'll never have to walk more than half a mile to one. They have no keypad - you simply pick up the receiver and are immediately connected to a Highways Agency operator, who will be able to identify your location based on the phone that's being used. If you elect not to use one, but are within sight of it, they are marked with a location code which you can relay to the breakdown operator.
• In the same vein, payphones have disappeared from some areas but still remain in others. In some areas, the government has stepped in to prevent payphones from being taken out of service because they're still commonly used by the poor. It might also be cheaper to keep a payphone in operation than to erect a cellphone tower in a remote location where few people would use the cell service. And, on the other side of the coin, many cities went out of their way during the 1990s to remove pay phones in order to curtail their use as anonymous contact points for drug dealers, who are now forced to make do with disposable prepaid "burner" phones instead. In many places, especially in railway stations and airports, phone booths have been replaced by public terminals, that still function as payphones if you really need one, but their main function is to allow Internet access for tourists without laptops.
  • At the Masters Tournament, one of the four major championships in men's golf, you'll literally see lines of people waiting to use payphones. Reason? Augusta National Golf Club, the extremely exclusive (and private) club that runs the tournament, has a VERY strict "no cell phones" policy. So strict that anyone caught with a cell phone on the course gets a lifetime ban from returning. (The only exception is that people with media credentials can take phones with them, but can ONLY have them out while in the club's media center.)
• In the past in North America, apartment buildings were equipped with buzzers that were basically columns of buttons: each button was hard-wired to a console in one of the apartments, where tenants would be advised of visitors by a literal buzz coming from the console. (You can see this in Breakfast at Tiffany's.) As buildings became larger (and as tenants balked at the ugly plastic consoles that disfigured their walls), a new system was devised whereby the buzzer on the main floor was instead connected to a telephone line and would send the buzz instead directly to the tenant's telephone. (Still used in many gated communities and apartment complexes.) Unfortunately, tenants don't always have landlines, so the buzzer would often be connected to a cellphone number — which could be both expensive and insecure if the tenant were out of town or had an out-of-town cellphone number. This is why landlords often specify that tenants must have landline phones. (Apartment buildings outside of North America may still have the old style of buzzer due not just to the above problems but also because in many countries it can take months to get a landline telephone installed.)
  • In Canada especially the smaller provinces like Saskatchewan still use buzzers primarily.
  • The fear of burglars made (quite literally) all apartment buildings in Romania to install intercoms in the 1990s. Complete systems, with a separate (from the "true" numbered phone) landline phone for each apartment, digital buzzer panel and digital keyboard at each entrance. Economies of scale made the expense affordable even for the years of poverty after the fall of Communism.
• It's becoming more and more common for people to eschew knocking on doors in favor of calling the person's cell phone for a couple of reasons.
  • The front door of an apartment complex may be locked, and the resident is expected to answer the call, come to the front door, and unlock it.
  • It can be a safety issue. If a person is underage, elderly, disabled or female, an immigrant (even legal), or non-white; getting a knock on a door can be scary. It's a gamble between whether they should even look out the window (if there even is one) or just sit very quietly and hope the knocker goes away. A call telling them that so-and-so is coming over, or a call that so-and-so is sitting in the driveway gives a sense of peace and safety and is far easier for, say, someone with limited hearing to understand than a shouted name. (They might not actually hear a knock on the door.)
  • Calling also gives residents who have skittish dogs a chance to reassure or restrain their pet before it starts barking its head off about the strange intruder at the door.
• Remember those strange chimes that used to be heard in department stores? Those chimes were actually used to page departments in the store (instead of using a PA system), though they are rarely used today. Sometimes those are used as Stock Sound Effects, such as the "perfume department" scene in the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Shanghaied". These days, if the retail clerks in any given store want to talk to each other, they'll typically all have two-way radios, sometimes with ear pieces and microphones. In addition to not bothering the customers by blaring an announcement over the whole store, it allows the staff to talk to one person or one department specifically, which saves time.
  • The chimes, themselves, were the descendants of an even older obsolete technology: the use of differently pitched bell-pulls to summon household servants in wealthy homes. Household intercoms and/or cell calls are the norm now.
• In 2000, the police department in Ontario, California, disciplined two of its officers for using their digital pagers to send personal text messages, some of which were sexually explicit, in violation of department policy. Since the department had obtained the messages by asking the pager company for transcripts to see (ostensibly) if the officers needed a higher character limit than the city had contracted for, the officers took the city to court, arguing their privacy rights had been violated. Ten years later, it had reached the U.S. Supreme Court, by which time no one was using digital pagers anymore. Appropriately, the court's unanimous ruling in the city's favor declined to set what might have been a precedent in its first-ever case involving privacy in personal electronic communications technology, citing the fluctuating state of the technology involved.
  • The SCOTUS has Marched On since then, decreeing that personal smartphones are now comparable to personal homes in terms of how much private information they contain, hence can't be searched without a warrant.
  • The reason for this is that most, if not all, people have very private information and items saved on their phones, such as PINs, passwords, photographs, contact lists, etc. Many lawyers advise that during a police encounter, you immediately lock your phone. The police officer cannot take it without a warrant, but it can be confiscated if you are arrested. If it is not locked, everything on it is available to them, and many corrupt police officers have availed themselves of personal information stored on a confiscated, but unlocked, cell phone. Once locked, do not give them the passcode under any circumstances. Let your lawyer handle any questions they have regarding your phone.
• This trope shows a key difference in thought between generations. Most older adults in the West still have land lines—their "home" phone—and wouldn't dream of getting rid of it despite being redundant with cell phones (good luck getting your grandparents to drop the service they've had for decades). Meanwhile, most younger adults don't have land lines in their homes at all.
  • The extremes of this are the term "cell phone" becoming less common, especially among younger speakers who assume the term "phone" on its own refers to a device carried in one's pocket.
  • One factor tending to reduce the elimination of landlines is the proliferation of DSL and cable modems with landline support. If you're getting DSL, the extra for a landline in minimal, and the extra cost for adding landline service to cable modem service is also generally quite low.
  • Parents will sometimes get a landline for several reasons — for instance in case there is an emergency in the house and the parent's cellphone is broken or lost or unavailable (or the parent is out), plus more simple reasons like the parents are tired of their children's friends calling the parent' cellphone asking if they can talk to their child. Other parents want to give their children experience using a telephone before actually giving their children their own cellphone.
    • Other reasons someone might have a landline phone include (but are not limited to) living in a place where cell phone signal is spotty or nonexistent, running a business out of their home, or simply the peace of mind of having a backup in case the cell phone is lost/stolen/breaks/etc. Some apartment complexes have security gates that rely on a visitor entering a code that rings the tenant's landline so the resident can press a button to admit their visitor, thus requiring a landline for residents of such complexes.
    • Many cable/satellite companies offer bundled service options that include a landline free of additional charge if the customer buys TV and internet services.
• Telephone cards used to be very common. They ranged from crude "scratch off" cards (the user scratched off the code to make the calls) all the way to credit card like systems that the user could swipe on a payphone or dial the code on the back. Users purchased minutes of talk time, the price depending on how many minutes and where the calls were going. First there were domestic calls, then international "calling cards." They were very popular with people who were in the military, had relatives overseas, traveled a lot or didn't want to pay for long distance. The rise of cell phones has killed off most of these cards except for calls to locations like the Middle East or Asia. Many cell phone companies offer special packages for calling neighboring countries or traveling abroad. The rise of internet services like Skype has also taken away the appeal of telephone cards among younger people.
  
  On a similar note, there were also special phone numbers (such as the widely remembered 10-10-321) people could use to make long distance calls which only added a few more cents or dollars on their phone bill up to a certain amount of minutes before the caller would be charged at normal rates for long distance calls. Nowadays, phone companies include long distance calling in their standard package/billing, so needing to dial a specific number to make a long distance call was no longer needed plus it quickly became a pain for everyone who had to dial an extra set of numbers on top of the phone number just to make a call.
  • Averted in whichever country phone cards are commonly used to make international calls to, as that's because phone cards are still common there. Japan still makes extensive use of phone cards, for instance, and there are even licensed property phone cards there, with special artwork from anime and video games on them. Phone cards are also still in wide use in the United States and Canada among communities of people who come from these parts of the world, as well as by people here and there who rarely use their phones and find it cheaper to just buy individual calls or small amounts of call time from these cards than paying monthly bills.
• In the case of technology having long moved on, many elderly people still lease their home phones from the telephone company. In the early days of commercial telephone service, even a basic rotary phone was expensive to purchase, so most people leased their phones from the service provider for about $6 a month (not unlike leasing a cell phone today). Nowadays you can outright buy a no-frills home phone for that much, yet countless seniors never got around to cancelling their lease as it has been part of their phone bill since day one. This means that they have paid thousands of dollars over the years for the most basic of telephones. In many cases they don't even have the phone anymore, having long since upgraded to something newer, but they're still paying that $6 monthly bill. The phone companies themselves, unsurprisingly, have had no incentive to inform elderly customers of this and cancel what's basically free money.
• An Internet meme featuring Chicago reporter Bob Sirott covering a CES event in the 1980s, that first appeared around 2013: "20 years later and all of these things fit in your pocket." Before that, it was a joke about microminiaturization that dated back to the mid-60s, when tiny pocket radios became popular. Science fiction reviewer G. Harry Stine, talking about Star Trek communicators, tricorders and data storage squares observed that computers would soon "fit in a tooth". This was in 1968.
• Due to the proliferation of cell phones, and nationwide long-distance calling, it's very rare that one would actually have to place a collect (or reverse-charge) phone call these days. It's also important to note that some VoIP services are unable to accept collect calls.
  • For the same reason, it's also rare that one would have to use a prepaid calling card to place a long-distance call, unless they were making an international phone call or calling from Prison or a similar setting that requires the use of a prepaid card to place a long-distance call. Or if you're traveling (say, staying at a vacation rental or a bed and breakfast), where local phone calls are included, but long-distance calls (domestic or international) are not.
• Nine Hundred Numbers. These were phone numbers that, in the days before unlimited nationwide long-distance calling and smartphones, would provide a plethora of services for a fee. These included weather reports, stock reports, sports statistics, TV listings, psychic readings, the chance to talk to a favorite celebrity or fictional character, horoscopes, summaries of TV episodes, traffic reports, and (most notoriously of all) phone sex lines. Although they do still exist today, they are far fewer in number, thanks to extensive restrictions on them, and, more in line with the trope, local and toll-free numbers, the Internet, and (most of all) mobile apps, many of which provide these services for free.
• Phone books. Back in the days before the Internet was in wide use, if you didn't know a phone number off the top of your head, you had to look it up in a large book database, distributed by the local phone company every year. In North America, for example, there was a section for residential phone numbers printed on white paper, the "white pages,"^note One could pay a yearly fee to not have their number listed if they so desired and a section for business phone numbers on yellow paper, the "yellow pages." If the service area was large enough, these would often be separate books. There were also smaller specialized directories as well: the "Blue Pages" for government listings (usually in the back of the Yellow Pages), and some cities had specialized directories like "Black Pages" for Black-owned businesses, "Pink Pages" for LGBT resources, etc. Nowadays, you can just Google the number to any local business you like. And during the brief time when white pages and widespread cell-phone use coexisted, cell phone numbers were never listed, meaning the white pages became unreliable once people switched to cell phones en masse. For all these reasons, phone books went out of print in the 2010's.
• Answering machines. For those not familiar with them, they were recording devices, either digital or on tape (depending on the time period), where callers could record a message for you if you didn't answer (this also made them useful for screening calls in the days before caller ID). Nowadays, they've largely been superseded by voicemail. This is partly because of the proliferation of cell phones and VoIP, and partly because voicemail is more convenient and can store more messages than an answering machine can.
  • Voicemail was never popular in countries where prepaid plans are far more popular due to their affordability, since it means you're wasting precious balance which you could've used for texting the recipient instead. But then messaging apps start offering the option to send a recorded voice message, which combines the convenience of not having to type or read the messages with the threaded nature of messaging apps. They're still a niche though, since playing it out loud is frowned upon when in public, and so far they're not easily searchable like their textual counterpart.
• On that note, caller ID. Prior to its existence, you either had to screen calls with an answering machine, or else you were forced to answer every call that came to your phone. Which meant you could be fielding calls from telemarketers, scammers, Prank Calls, and other types of Harassing Phone Call. And, in fictionland, the odd Evil Phone. Nowadays, all you have to do is look at a screen, and if you don't recognize the number (or if you do, but you don't want to talk to them), or if it says "unknown," "private," "restricted," and so on (meaning the caller is using a phone code that obscures their number), you don't have to answer it.
• Pagers, also referred to as "beepers". These were popular back in The '90s. These were devices that, well, beeped and/or vibrated to let their owners know that they had received a message on their home or office phone. They began to go the way of the dodo as more and more home phones became equipped with caller ID, and more and more people started to carry cell phones around. Today, apart from medical workers (particularly EMS, and doctors who are "on call"), police officers, and firefighters, few people use them.
• Telephone numbers. Up until the Turn of the Millennium, at least in the US, if you were placing a local call, you didn't have to dial the area code. Matter of fact, there was a time when if you lived within the same exchange (the second three numbers), you only had to dial the last four! As long-distance calling technology improved, and more people got long-distance plans bundled into their standard bills, it became necessary to dial the area code, because it's entirely possible that two people from different local areas have the same exchange-number combo (For example, Alice's number is [phone], and Bob's is [phone]). In addition, the explosion in mobile phones meant increased demand for phone numbers, necessitating instances where an area would have two or more area codes (For instance, area code 212 was originally assigned to all of New York City, but now covers only the island of Manhattan, which is shared with 646, 332, and part of the city-wide 917 area codes). So, to avoid confusion, dialing the area code became necessary for all phone calls. There are some exceptions in less-populous states where the area code covers the entire state, in which case dialing the area code from a phone number that shares it is still unnecessary.
• Phoneaholic Teenagers being given their own separate phone line, or asking for one. Nowadays, their parents would buy them a cell phone. The same goes for someone getting a dedicated line for the Internet modem; now that most homes are using broadband, or at least DSL, neither of which tie up the telephone the way 56K dial-up did (and many of said homes are doing away with home phones altogether), it's just no longer necessary to have a phone line for the modem and another phone line for, well, the phone.
• The custom of "Going Calling": Prior to the invention and proliferation of the telephone, if you wanted to talk to your friends in real time (as opposed to sending a letter), you had to actually visit them and talk to them face-to-face. Women (and it was almost always women) had a system where they would show up unannounced at each other's homes in order to speak to their friend, sister, etc. Often they were housewives socializing while their husbands were at work and their children at school. From there they would sit in the living room and chat, sometimes for hours, sometimes just for a few minutes. If she wasn't home, then the "caller" (that is, the one who attempted to visit) would leave a unique "calling card", which was sort of like a modern-day business card, except for personal use, with her name on it. (Plus two cards with her husband's name.) It was expected that whoever she tried to call on would go to her home and call on her ASAP. Not returning the call was seen as rudely blowing her off. Sound familiar?^note Edith Tolkien, a friendly but shy soul, had so much trouble with this system as employed by Oxford professors' wives that she became known as one who "did not call" and was excluded from dinner parties and social engagements. But as more and more homes became equipped with telephones, it was no longer necessary to physically go to people's homes just to chat, and so the custom died out. In fact, nowadays it's heavily frowned upon to visit someone's home without contacting them first to see if they're up for company and giving them time to prepare.
  • This is also where "gentleman caller" comes from. A man calling on a woman not related to him implied that he was dating her, and over time it came to imply purely sexual relations.
• Fax machines. These are machines that would scan information from an original sheet, and send a copy of that information along a dedicated phone line (called a "data line", the exact type of thing used if you had a separate line for the telephone and Internet in the days of 56K dial-up). Nowadays, thanks to email attachments, text messaging, and cloud-based document-sharing services such as Google Drive, it's increasingly rare to send or receive faxes anymore. There are some exceptions, typically in the medical field, and they remain widespread in Japan, where its older populace is slow to adapt to new technology.^note And on that matter, you'd most likely be asked to get a fax machine if you want to work with a Japanese company.
• As smartphones rose in popularity, MP3 players became increasingly obsolete. For instance, the now-discontinued iPod Touch is basically just an iPhone with the telephone feature removed. Once cell phones gained the ability to play music, having a separate device became redundant. Furthermore, downloading music in MP3 format has largely been replaced by streaming platforms such as YouTube, Spotify, and Pandora, thus eliminating the need for music storage. In an ironic twist of fate, physical media—itself formerly supplanted by digital downloads—ended up making a comeback around the turn of the 2010s, largely due to a resurgence in public interest in vinyl records that bled over to the formation of cult followings around CDs and cassettes as well.
• Desktop computers are all but obsolete these days except when required for gaming, filmmaking, and other resource-intensive tasks, given that laptops and tablets are cheaper, portable, easier to handle, and take up less space. Even most places of business have given up on desktops, opting instead to give their employees laptops which they can then project onto monitors via a docking station.
• The prevalence of cell phones in the modern world has led to many celebrities explaining in their autobiographies or memoirs that the phones they had to use while growing up in the 90s or earlier were landlines. Some of them (like MLB Hall of Famer Larry "Chipper" Jones for example) go as far as to explain what a landline actually is for the benefit of any younger readers who are unlikely to have come across them on a regular basis.
• One thing many take for granted is the idea of a phone "ringing". Early telephones had a physical bell inside them that would literally ring when they received a call. But starting in the 80's, phone manufacturers switched out the bells for digital tones to sound more modern. Still, people would say the phone was ringing for simplicity's sake. Nowadays with the rise of cell phones, ringtones, and what have you, people will say their phone is ringing regardless of the noise it makes, or even if it's set to silent but the owner notices someone is trying to call. The only exception is if it's set to vibrate; there's a 50-50 chance the owner will say their phone is "buzzing" instead.
  • Ringtones themselves went from simplistic monophonic, initially identical on all devices of the same model due to the very limited storage, then comes with several preloaded tones, maybe even composable on the phone itself. More powerful CPU and larger storage then allow polyphonic that mimics musical instruments, the implementation is usually similar to, or even plain MIDI. The limitation of these formats means there's a market for creative tones that embrace the format and set the phone owner apart from factory defaults. Current truetones are just plain audio recordings, and personalizing ringtones was so desirable the industry made billions both by licensing existing music or producing dedicated ringtones. Today having your phone ringing loudly in public is considered gaudy and most will just use a relatively muted preloaded tone, if not silencing it entirely. The flash LED and screen can light up too so the owner still notices a call even when it's impossible or hard to hear any ringtone without carrying it everywhere to feel the vibration.
• The issue of Police Brutality in the United States has been changed by the proliferation of cell phones. Many people have complained about bad cops subjecting them to brutality and horrifying treatment, and planting false evidence to arrest them on trumped-up charges. Members of certain minority groups in particular have complained for decades about the police singling them out, as exemplified by the N.W.A song "Fuck tha Police". Their complaints and grievances were often simply brushed aside and ignored, with allegations and incidents being swept under the rug because police testimony was considered more reliable. Nowadays, with the advent of cell phones, social media, and new ways of recording footage, claims of police brutality are being taken much more seriously. In particular, the conviction of Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin for murdering George Floyd had shown this change. The Minneapolis Police Department's official report described Floyd's death as a "medical incident", but footage from a bystander's phone disproved that allegation and left no doubt that Floyd's death had been the direct result of Chauvin's actions.
  • On the other hand, the heavy-handed coppers found the way to abuse the copyright protection features of modern video hosts such as YouTube, which would block the videos with a copyrighted soundtrack. They would simply blast some music of a particularly lawsuit-happy artist or a copyright owner on the top volume before beating the suspect, and rely on the automated copyright protection to block the uploading of the incriminating video.
• SIM cards were the size of credit cards with phones large enough to take them entirely. Early phones lacked their own storage and just kept the messages and contacts inside the SIM card memory, so migrating to a new phone will keep all your messages and contacts. Eventually, phones get smaller and force SIM cards to adopt smaller form factors too since the actual working part is just a chip located behind the small contact. To squeeze even more space, eSIMs skip the slot and just plant the chip in the board, and iSIM move it inside the SoC itself.
• In countries where mobile plan doesn't include unlimited call and text, affordable data package and ubiquitous WiFi means it's cheaper to just use third-party call & messaging apps that use internet connection. Plain call and text interoperability becomes less relevant when in some countries phones comes preloaded with the popular messaging apps and over 90% of the population use them. Aside from offering more features, these apps also eliminate the cost segmentation of international call and text, since everything are usually free regardless of the sender and recipient location. People working or living in buildings without good tower coverage but usable WiFi get to stay connected, and even travelling internationally just require buying a local SIM or a portable MiFi for cheap data package, without the hassle of notifying contacts on which number is reachable. Even if someone doesn't deliberately use a third-party app, by default both stock iMessage in iPhones and Messages in Android will send messages through the internet if the recipient also have the corresponding app instead of using the operator's SMS gateway. Right now iPhones and Android use different standards, but once iMessage gains support for RCS, both Android and iPhones will text each other through internet instead of SMS protocol.

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